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167 comments on Countdown to $200 oil meets Anglo Disease
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167 comments on Countdown to $200 oil meets Anglo Disease
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I love how people never like to take responsiblity for their actions. "O, the media made me buy the house I could never afford". That's exactly it.
Most people don't have the self-confidence in their analytical capabilities to resist the endless drumbeat from the media, from their neighbors, from the government. Many people thought they could not afford their house, but figured they must be wrong because everyone was saying they could.
For obvious reasons, the government & the media do not teach or encourage independent thinking. They want sheeple. They got sheeple. And while I do hold the sheeple accountable, there are mitigating circumstances.
"mitigating circumstances" is exactly what it is. It is ironic that we are in an epoch that claims that individual freedom and responsibility trumps everything, and where there is an incessant drumbeat to make sure that people use their "freedom" in the proscribed way.
It's like "democracy" around the world: a country that "freely" choose to ally itslef with the USA will be labelled a democracy, while one that uses its freedom to be hostile will be denigrated and called a dictature or worse. We have responsibility, and we have the "right" choice. You can't mix and match.
So yes, there are mitigating circumstances - although not for the cheerleaders of "freedom."
Jerome - I really believed all of the stories growing up about the U.S. being the greatest country on earth and the missionary zeal that Americans tried to spread "freedom". I lived abroad in the Philipines for over a year when I was a kid and the fact that the Philipinos had so much less only served as evidence of our obvious superiority.
I was in my second year in college when I had a sociology course and in the testbook was a cartoon of a group of pirates raising the Jolly Roger exclaiming "Aye it's a grand flag". It made me laugh but from then on I started questioning things.
Now when I consider all that we've done to "F" up the planet we really are the easy villains, but unlike the Nazis in old WWII pictures we seemed to have started out with the best of intentions.
Is stupidity a crime?
"called a dictature"
Nah, just socialist, like Yerup is. The Germans, for instance:-)
Cheers from Munique
These comments are all fascinating. I agree that the media, the government, the banking/credit industries, etc. are all partially responsible for the overuse/abuse of consumer credit. What can combat this most successfully is education in the home--kids learn about money and sustainablity as they grow up, mainly from their parents but also other adults, and they tend to keep those habits or adopt new (probably bad) habits in place of no training at all. If parents teach their children to be cautious and feel confident in their decision-making, financial and otherwise--no sheeple! I doubt there was any way our parents could fully forsee the kind of supermarketing for easy credit that the "Anglo Disease" has so disastrously dealt, along with a host of other problems, but parents and their children can no longer afford any lapses in financial reality training. We can't expect some sort of visionary understanding the moment they leave home of what frugality/economy, interest, sustainability and self-sufficiency really mean--it has to be embedded over years of careful teaching moments. (Teenagers heading to college, at least in the US, are offered thousands and thousands of dollars in "student loans" which could strap and stunt them for years. Cost of education skyrocketing? well of course, what will all this "free money" lying around . . . ). Children are not able to train themselves and we can't expect more untrained adults to make any better decisions than what's gone on already. Loads of work for parents like myself! But, it is empowering to realize how important we our to the next generation's quality of living.
That's what I'm pointing to, in part.
I'm looking at the fundamentally untenable situation we've set up with our fiat currency and its imminent collapse. Who of the rich knew that they were operating in a system that was unsustainable? Whether they would have done something about it is another matter, but I'm quite certain that there were/are many people who authentically thought that free markets, which tend to permit positive feedback loops to be set up quite easily ("the rich get richer"), were "the right" way to better the collective good. I am not blind, by the way, to the fact that the human emotion of greed is operating in many cases when people advocate free markets, too.
On the other hand, I think people "without" also often have a story/narrative that they are somehow disadvantaged ("I wasn't born rich" "I'm not smart" "The system is set up against me" "I have x/y/z skin color" "I think money is evil" "Poor people are better people, therefore I 'choose' to be poor" "People who are rich are somehow sneaky or cheaters or liars") and then they don't take the actions that would make a difference because they are trapped by their story. They may in fact have certain circumstances that are true, but circumstances can almost always be worked around, perhaps with some exceptions. These stories (or "limiting beliefs" as we call them in the coaching world) aren't unique to people without money, but when someone doesn't have money, there is always, in my experience, one of these stories operating. Have the person see that they are just stories ("limiting beliefs") and suddenly they are freed up to take actions they would not have taken before.
Back to the free market system. I come across people now in the environmental field who still think development of "underdeveloped" countries via free market mechanisms will lift the people there out of poverty. Well, it will, and in the early stages of development I don't think people are worried about the end game i.e. that the system will result in what we have in the Western nations with vast differences between the rich and the poor.
It seems to me it always comes down to education. As I said, I just in the past six months learned about the worldwide credit bubble. I don't think many of "the rich" knew that collapse was mathematically the only result possible once the system is set up.
The most fascinating thing in the past two years was to see bankers talking about the bubble, and announcing that they were ready for the crash (sometimes going so far as to hire restructuring professionals) while continuing the practices that fed the bubble ("it's where the market is") - and getting caught with their pants down when the crisis did strike, brutally.
I ride my bike frequently to Portland - an 18 mile each-way trip. I grow more than enough food for family. My house is paid for. But that is not responsibility, it is congruence. It is as much as I can do and to do less would not be personally acceptable. But it is a luxury that I have that most of those in the vehicles passing me on the road do not have. It's not responsibility - frankly it is more of an experiment: how far can I go on the bleeding/leading edge?
"Never take responsibility for the actions". What would Homer Simpson say? It takes two to fraud. One to create the fraud and another to accept it. And that is American business. Responsibility and American? Oh please - oxymoron. What are consumers supposed to think? Are they supposed to know better than the system, to know that all these loans are fraud?
Who is responsible for the polar bears, the eels, the plankton, the bees, the bats, the trees and the rocks? Perhaps they should hire lobbyists? It's their fault they did not?
cfm in Gray, ME, manufacturer of fine guillotines.
I teach my clients that responsibility is a choice. That's because it exists only in language, as all concepts do.
This trips people up when they confuse "responsibility" with "causality," which happens often.
I can literally take responsibility for anything and everything, or nothing. All that's required is a declaration of responsibility on the part of the person taking responsibility.
When others are holding a person to their word when the person says he will be responsible for something, then we say that the person is accountable.
Looking from this perspective, people generally take responsibility for a narrow set of items when they are first born (actually, until they gain language, they are unable to take responsibility for anything). One could say that through education, maturity and wisdom, people gradually take on being responsible for more and more things, like concentric circles that wrap around them. Many people's concentric circles never get very far from them while some people, like Martin Luther King, take responsibility for all of it. Dr. King took responsibility for the condition of all men in this country (notice he did not say just black men — he said all men) then he started taking actions consistent with that responsibility.
So Dryki, it is perfectly valid for you to say that you are not taking responsibility — until you declare that you are.
DT - What you're saying is not exactly right. People are looking at circumstances from a societal perspective that have to do with our culture of greed and consumerism. We always wanted more yet more was never enough and we believed that consuming was good at least that was what we were led to believe.
We all went along with it therefore we are complicit in the crimes. But what people are trying to do now is break the spell of these stories once and for all.
TOD is about creating new stories, stories worth living.